A fitness club I was part of a decade ago had this amazing 'cafe' space that was often used by folks with laptops and the odd bit of chat. It felt social. If work anywhere becomes the thing, is there is scope for work 'clubs'? Or without the fitness reason to be there at all, is it a nonstarter?

> ownership of digital goods which can't be owned?

One interesting fact it is what the ownership means legally. If there was a successful image that an expensive NFT owner had, it wouldn't surprise me to see some legal shenanigans. This has not been tested yet. Capability does not give you the rights to make copies of digital art. "Can't be owed" is a rather brave claim I think.

> You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies

Interestingly it is not dissimilar to a lot of physical art. To the extent that some 'restorations' of damaged art contain a lot of paint of the restorer rather than the original artist. I believe there are many professionals who are capable of creating something visually indistinguishable from the Mona Lisa, say.

Without specialised equipment you would have a very hard time telling reality from a good copy. So I am forced to conclude (what dealers will say quite explicitly) that most of the value is in the provenance not the physicality. "NFT is rubbish" becomes less obvious, to me.

Boom.

So I'm indirectly asking a black software engineer by virtue of reading the blog: What are the things that should be done instead? Not a lot we can do it about stop and search. How do we actively bust bias? He slams the 'meritocracy' meme: I know that is widely backed here. So what can be done instead?

> Personally, I have no attachment to any of these words.

Sadly, I think a large proportion of people absolutely have a very strong attachment to not changing anything. Who will agree with you on this front but be against anything more substantial? I've been told on this board that the only racism is antiwhite.

I had seen that claim before but I never noticed it. I subscribe to about 250 YouTube channels. They seem to appear in my subscriptions, in chronological order, as they're released. Are you referring to the homepage rather than subscriptions?

Your point is completely correct. As is the other comment here at about night and day. The lists are frequent. And not unique to European cultures.

But it's also not reasonable to say that in our particular culture, meaning as a political and social context.

Because I'm trying to make a bigger point than just race, I could imagine reading a similar things to what you're writing back in the late-C20 saying that 'Man' has been nongendered for centuries and in many cultures and in all kinds of language. Hi wouldn't disagree.

But then the next step: so women shouldn't have been worried about companies wanting to hire businessmen. That just doesn't seem ok.

So I definitely think that 'Black equals bad, white equals good' Has all kinds of historical significance, non racist links, and would not have been considered weird until very recently. But in our context I'm not offended that it would be something we find alternatives for.

Please be a bit more careful. Please don't assume you know what or how much I'm thinking.

I think the situation isn't as binary as you seem to be presenting it. The context of the word is a metaphor. The metaphor is commonly used for 'good versus bad'. This being a common metaphor in western language might not be helpful to some people. It's not difficult to be more explicit or to use a different metaphor.

> you are the one who needs to think about ... I am able to think on my own.

:) You know the classic idea: "I know I'm right, therefore you are either less intelligent or haven't thought hard enough!"?

You know how easy that is to think and why our brain gets us to think that way?

Really? Regardless of what you think about racism, I don't want to be funny isn't it obvious that one is a metaphor and one isn't?

This is not a racism question, but would you think 'Concrete' in 'ConcreteList' is functionally the same as in 'Concrete road'?

I can't imagine how a blacklist is the colour black. Blood sausage is. Except the Irish version I know. Which is called white pudding.

I figured that would be the feel of the objection.

Maybe I should be grateful as a white person that that's not the world I find myself in. Happy to pick my variable names.

I can't help but feel that the antagonism here is very similar to the antagonism I mentioned about Gendered language. The anger seemed mostly caused by being surprised by being asked to think about something.

> it trivializes all this historic pain to some inane game of word association

I think addressing one issue does not 'trivialise' everything else. It can be horribly overstated but changing small fry can help provide momentum to change something more significant.

> It's complete bullshit,

It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that? Given changing a metaphor 'black' into a meaning 'block' doesn't seem to me a generally bad idea.

I understand the logic of 'that's just what languages is.' But language changes when people use it differently. It seems to me very reasonable to say let's use this language a little bit less unfortunately.

I'm not suggesting this is 100% the same but re: language change. I remember that time not too many years ago when people would argue that referring to a 'man' or 'him' at work was non-gendered. And those women complaining that we only talked about business men were just being unreasonable. I'm sure there are still places like that but I'm very glad that my co's & clients changed.

I can understand why he enjoyed building mathematical models. And why reviews of "Balance of the Planet" praised that. But assuming that was the point, I think missed the point.

I think it would be like creating Demons Souls, loving creating the back story, getting lots of praise for it, and deciding that the best thing is an interactive fiction game with nothing but unlimited detail back story. Then wondering some years later why you didn't change the world, no one has gone further than you did, and all games seem shallow compared to your imagination. Fortunately Miyazaki went a different way.

Not a surprise that Will Wright and Sid Meier (who I know is very much a fan of complexity theory) went in a more successful direction.

"Why have I failed? ... The simple answer is that ... I’m too far ahead of my time... I’m a misunderstood genius. ... the world doesn’t yet perceive a need for the ideas I peddle. In 1885, physicists didn’t perceive a need for special relativity, and they would have rejected it out of hand."

Or... you're wrong.

[In the movie "Matrix"] "Neo has been revived and looks down the hall at the agents and sees the reality of the Matrix: that it is numbers. I see the same thing when I look at the real world."

I've been following his work for years, And spoken to people who have been to his 'conference' (and who I suspect will be rather bemused by the way he described them here!). The general consensus was it's horribly self-referential impracticality.

There is a reason he hasn't made anything practical in 35 years. Since the time when his success at 80s game development made him think it was the wrong thing that caused the success. (Hint: it was not his ad-hoc mathematical models, no matter how much post-doc justification he can ladle on them).

I have wondered about him, but sadly this post is rather damning in my eyes.

"Why is B a hoax?" doesn't seem to me an unreasonable response.

I'm honestly amazed some (especially undo!) were shrugged away so easily.

Code that has worked for 30 years is more technical debt than the ability to support 'new languages' or 'pivot' the code? Maybe I am an old fart, but the opposite seems right to me.

Large code bases are difficult to add functionality to.

A code base that is easy to pivot and switch languages sounds more like a nightmare. Isn't it more likely that your new, zeitgeist-capable software would torpedo development in far less than 30 years. As I understand "new programmers", the 'reinventing the wheel' speed is measured in a few years not decades now.

Or did I misunderstand you?